Share This Story!

Crystal Bowersox has 'All That' and more

"Everything fell into place on this record," Crystal Bowersox says. "It was almost too easy. I'm still waiting for the bottom to fall out." Things could have gone otherwise for American Idol's ninth-season

Tags

"Everything fell into place on this record," Crystal Bowersox says. "It was almost too easy. I'm still waiting for the bottom to fall out."

Things could have gone otherwise for American Idol's ninth-season runner-up, who releases her second album, All That for This, on Tuesday. After all, the story of the album began with Bowersox being dropped from Jive Records, a move she found "disheartening."

"Rejection sucks, no matter what," says the singer-songwriter, who had released her debut album, Farmer's Daughter, for Jive in 2010. But she soon signed to the independent Shanachie Entertainment, which had released Idol's second-season winner Ruben Studdard's Letters From Birmingham in 2012.

Things got even easier when the time came to record the album that became All That for This. Bowersox and husband Brian Walker had moved to Portland, Ore., after visiting the city in 2011 for their one-year anniversary. "We were sold," says Bowersox, who likes the city's lifestyle. "Everyone is conscious of environmental issues. The city composts. I've never been to another city that has a composting program."

Then, when fellow singer-songwriter Jackie Greene recommended she consider Steve Berlin to produce her album, she discovered that the man whose production credits included Los Lobos, Rickie Lee Jones and Faith No More lived nearby in Portland.

"I got to sleep in my own bed, take my kid to preschool, then go to work," says Bowersox, 27. "It was so relaxed, and he's a sweetheart of a guy, a genius when it comes to music. He's got rhythms that I've never heard."

Bowersox wrote or co-wrote every song on the album except for a cover of The Sundays' 1990 Britpop hit Here's Where the Story Ends, which she cut at Berlin's suggestion.

Bowersox also got Wallflowers frontman Jakob Dylan to cut a duet called Stitches. The two singers bonded over the song because they're both parents of sons. "He's got four boys, and I've got a boy, so stitches came up in the conversation," Bowersox says.

Bowersox calls her own son, Tony, 4, Mr. Calamity. "He has had three staples and six stitches," she says. "He's also had a broken ankle. I feel like Mother of the Year.

"We put bumpers all over the house, and he still finds that one edge he can knock himself with. I don't get it."

Bowersox and Walker wrote the country waltz after an emergency-room trip with Tony.

The song, which addresses both physical and emotional wounds, includes these lines: "There's only one thing I can think of to do/I'll pull out my thimble, my needle and thread/And I'll stitch you back up like new."

In May, Bowersox will start rehearsals for her upcoming starring roll in Always … Patsy Cline. The musical is preparing a summer Broadway run that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the country singer's tragic death in a plane crash.

"I didn't know too much about her personal story until last year, when I started reading biographies," Bowersox says. The opportunity to play the singer came along completely independently of Bowersox's reading, however.

Bowersox says she expressed her desire to appear on Broadway to her manager one day over coffee. About a year later, the manager called Bowersox and told her she'd been offered the role of Cline.

"I did a little dance and screamed and giggled on the phone," Bowersox says.

Bowersox says one of Cline's signature hits, the 1961 crossover standard Crazy, has been in her repertoire about as long as she has sung in public.

"My mom used to take me around to karaoke bars when I was 9, 10 years old, and that was a song I loved," she says, adding that she also knew writer Willie Nelson's version of the song. "I sang that at karaoke bars, and everyone would go, 'Aw, look at the cute little girl singing Crazy!' "